My older daughter watched this over my shoulder just now and asked "Is he alive?"

Wow. And I thought Kovalainen's crash today was bad.

buff right out?

i'd be too busy going "oh crap" from both ends.

That comes across like some completely unbelievable choreography from a bad action movie. Holy shit!

I can hardly believe how close that was. I just can hardly believe it.

Jesus Christ the Audis are untouchable

I makes me think. What if race cars have active control on down-force. Imagine a car that can, in a split-second could change it's down-force characteristics so that it could have high speed on the straights and extra weight on the corners. Or even take off and land like a plane. It'll make passing a new art.

@LandofMinos: Good idea, but i have to ask. Are you high?

for me id bes saying what in the world was that and just stop in the middle of the road

It's amazing how well cars survive these types of crashes, and their drivers live to tell about it. I had to watch the clip several times to see how close they were.

@Al Navarro:

At least Kovalainen's resulted from a blown tire. Ortelli just seems to have lost it.

It's amazing that in spite of all that, it lands on its wheels and he is sitting right where he was. Amazing engineering.
As for the Audi, I would love to know what that driver thought--I'm sure the last thing he expected to see was a racer on its hind leg coming at him like an ice skater.

Holy. Crap.

Glad Ortelli's OK, but sadly, this probably means they'll stick a chicane at the exit of Parabollica (the last corner). Oh well.

@LandofMinos: Active aero? Not gonna happen in today's homogenized, dumbed-down, cost-control-über-alles motorsports climate.

The very fact that the event was survived by a human occupant simply staggers my mind. And I am an engineer...

Ain't technology wonnerful...

I think this one deserves:

HOLY FUCKING SHIT!!

Something about the second camera angle was reminiscent of a video game crash, the kind where a player would say "There's no way I'd have survived if that had been real." Incredible that Ortelli did just that.

i'm not sure if he even limped away, because from what i've heard he broke his ankle... then again, Dario was walking on a broken ankle after his NASCAR crash yesterday.

@LandofMinos: kind of like the pop-up spoilers on the Larborghini Murcielago/Bugatti Veyron/ bunch of other supercars, the pop-up air brake on the SLR McLaren, and so on? active aero might actually be an interesting alternative to the way too much aero-dependancy of current F1 cars and next year's cars with almost no aerodynamic aids...

@smokeydog001: I thought they said Kovalainen's was a rim failure...

@charles_barrett: Between this, Mike McDowell's crash and Kubica you wonder how many of these guys would have survived their crashes 20 years ago. Goes to show you how safe the modern race car really is.

Kinda reminds me of that movie where the Oreca jumps over the kid...

@mwood10: It was. The rim failed causing the tire to blow.

@Sean_Hannity_has_AIDS:

Either way, it was not a good day for the lad.

McNish is fully legit, if he was driving the Audi - an impressive way to avoid having your head taken off!

With respect to active aero, it actually has existed in various forms in racing history perhaps most famously in CanAm on a Chaparall. It was quickly banned...

I'm not sure if that's from the aero suddenly taking a dump.

One thing that's worth noting is that today's aero is pretty unstable - it's wing based much more than it has been historically, and thus is far more susceptible to turbulence. Watch some old GTP races, and you'll see 'em follow nose-to-tail with nary a twitch.

i downloaded a video of the live coverage of this (sorry, can't post that here) because to me it looked like, although it was a very big wreck, there weren't any particularly hard impacts... but it actually looks even more shocking at full speed.

/\
replay with full speed and onboard shot from the Audi

@Corvette_Thunder: No question in my mind, it is little short of miraculous, and as a technocrat I'm all in favor of it...

Well there are at LEAST two drivers here who shit a pair of bricks on this day. All of a sudden, two racers were an inch taller in the seats.

It is some kind of cross promotion with "Speed Racer"? "See real cars could do that flying around and stuff"

He PASSED the Audi!

@smokyburnout: Was the second voice Super Dave Osbourne?

McNish ought to be thanking every god from Athena to Zoroaster.

@Duphman2: lol

It's much more stunning at full speed, not slowed down as in the above video:

@Adamskiy: I should also read the comments above before posting >.<

@charles_barrett: It's thought that Kovaleinen might have experienced more than 25Gs during his crash this weekend and ended up "mildly concussed." Wrap your engineer's mind around that. I might crash my car on purpose if I could walk away from that.

@Number_Six: More than 25 Gs isn't that insane as it sounds. G-resistance is more dependent on time. A slap on the face is several hundred Gs, but 15 Gs sustained for a minute will kill a man. If it was near instantaneous, obviously it won't kill him.

@UNÆVÒL\/ED: Point taken. It sounds shocking because the most I experience any given day is about 3Gs, when the Seoul city bus drivers brake as hard as they can to make old ladies fall over.

@charles_barrett:

Amen to that.

I wish we could see some of these safety features trickle down into "real" cars. Isn't that half of the justification for motorsports?

We should make people homologate their safety features :)

@Shapeshifter: well, i imagine even if you could integrate things like rollcages and carbon fiber tubs into street cars without making them really heavy and expensive, you still probably wouldnt be able to convince people to wear 5-point seatbelts, helmets and HANS devices, which probably have more to do with today's racing drivers walking away.

then again, normal drivers aren't running into each other at 180 mph, so maybe they'd be ok...

It was noted in Autosport recently that one of the ideas of the Overtaking Work Group for F1 was that they would allow cars to increase front wing angles when following another car to reduce the ill effects of being close to the car in front. not sure how you prevent a drive from running the higher downforce setting in other situations, but it would be fun to see them do it.

I was thinking that someone had been watching the Speed Racer previews a few too many times. it looks to be the first movie I'll actively seek out an IMAX theatre to see.

He had to have missed that Audi by mere inches. I mean, seriously, inches. Wow.

the audi driver gets all the + luck that ortelli didn´t have...

@smokyburnout: Thanks for the additional footage. It sounded like one announcer said, "repray," instead of replay, which makes sense to me.

Yeah, I think he did.

@smokyburnout: What's shocking is the sound of the car crashing and tumbling across the track. That is somethin else.

@Duphman2: Only at night

he missed that audi by mere centimeters, perhaps even a few milimeters!

i give it 6 flags, 5 holy shits, and 2 shittttts

@Stuntdriver - Yes the Audi driver got lucky. Ortelli was blessed to be able to survive that.

There would be no shame in the driver of the Audi admitting he pissed his pants a little as the other car came within inches of his tail.

The real-time version of this does indeed show much better the severity of this crash.

Slo-mo = Goddamn, that's nasty
Real-time: HOLY FUCKING SHIT

Props to the engineers. They did their jobs well.

@mwood10:

I thought they said Kovalainen's was a rim failure...

I would imagine Ortelli's rim went through some excitable moments around somersault 3. I know mine did, and I'm only watching it..